POETRY FRIDAY: The Summer Day

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. I was introduced to her poetry more than twenty years ago when I attended a Writers’ Conference at Salem State College. Oliver, one of the conference speakers, read from American Primitive, her collection of poems that won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. I have been an admirer of her work ever since then. I love American Primitive and House of Light. One of Oliver’s poems that I read again and again is The Summer Day. It can be found in House of Light and at the Poetry 180 website.

From The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

You’ve got to read the end of this poem. Just click here.

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Today at Wild Rose Reader I review two pictures books about the sea.